For a short, memorable time, a bachelor pad on the Upper West Side was home base for a young generation of Yiddishists.

Rokhl Kafrissen

Special To The Jewish Week

12/26/2012

I felt a pang of melancholy recently when I learned my friend Menachem Yankel Ejdelman was moving from his place at 101st and West End Avenue. It’s not like he’s being evicted or moving cross country (like many of the other friends I’ve met through Yiddishist circles).

Sometime in 1937, a group of real estate speculators gave up their hope that the Jamaica Bay inlet in the former village of Keschaechquereren would become a major New York port and donated the land they had acquired to New York City.

The Board of Aldermen voted to keep some 500 acres of that land for recreational space and named it Brooklyn Marine Park.

On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Saturday morning around 8:45 is a wonderful time to be Jewish. For there, against a background of catch-the-worm exercisers, snoozy coffee sippers and direction-challenged tourists, Jews of all denominations, beliefs, customs and practice wend their way towards worship, ever so briefly turning Broadway into Shabbatway.

As long as I can remember, I was aware of a mythical place in Manhattan known as The Seminary.

The Seminary was central to my parents’ life; it was the place where my father studied to be a rabbi and my mother made friends with the fiancés and wives of rabbinical students who, like her, were well-educated girls from good Jewish homes.

Bobby Kennedy’s visit to a shul on Eastern Parkway marked the beginning of the end of the borough’s liberal Jewish presence.

Barry E. Lichtenberg

Special To The Jewish Week

12/26/2012

Eastern Parkway, Frederick Law Olmstead’s six-lane masterpiece, bisects Central Brooklyn along its east-west axis, from Grand Army Plaza to Brownsville. And at the center of Eastern Parkway, in Crown Heights, stands an imposing building, whose limestone façade, oversized windows and prominent staircase resembles an Italian Renaissance palace, a palace that once anchored one of Conservative Judaism’s flagship synagogues, the Brooklyn Jewish Center.

Honoring Hizzoner, for his unabashed ethnic pride and for bringing New York back.

Thane Rosenbaum

Special To The Jewish Week

12/26/2012

Many eras could reasonably compete as the defining Jewish moment of New York City: pushcarts on the Lower East Side, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the CCNY point-shaving scandal, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike, the Brill Building’s influence on the American songbook, and the garment industry’s styling of American haute couture.

The Edison Café is a theater district institution and, for its matzah ball soup and latkes, a landmark of Jewish New York. Yet I never knew it was there. Born in the D.C. area, I pride myself on being a Jewish New Yorker By Choice who possesses all the knowledge and zeal of a convert. Or at least, I thought I did.

Oddly, a banker introduced me to the café a few years ago. I was working for Reuters as a business journalist back then. My job was to ingratiate myself with financiers in the hope that they would feed me a few morsels of market-moving information.